Is Society Raising A Stink Over Personal Hygiene?

September 6, 1989|By Larry Hackett New York Daily News

Personal hygiene, it appears, is no longer so personal. When it comes to ''offensive'' behavior, tolerance lies in the nose of the beholder.

That's what Randi Freeman and her husband, Amir Omrani, found out last month when a USAir flight crew kicked them off a Seattle-to-Syracuse flight because, officials say, the couple smelled badly. The couple, who lives in Sweden, denies the charge and has threatened to sue over the incident, but company officials are sticking by their crew's decision.

Was the stand-off in Seattle a sign that conformity has run amok? Do airline passengers and job applicants face a future of standardized stink tests? And just whose sense of smell will weigh in as the community standard, anyway? One woman's Passion, after all, might be another's Poison.

''You're looking at the convenience of all the passengers on a given flight,'' says USAir spokesman Larry Pickett, who points to a specific proviso in the airline's rule book that allows crew members to banish passengers with ''offensive odor.''

''You have this couple,'' Pickett adds, ''but you potentially have another 150 people on that plane who also want to get to their destination on time, and you have to consider their desires as well.''

Other people's desires prompted officials at a Morristown, N.J., library one day last winter to toss out a local homeless man who smelled so badly that patrons said they couldn't work in the same room.

The evicted man, Richard Kreimer, has since won the support of the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union in fighting some of the library's other rules, but the question of whether personal bouquet is grounds for ejection is still hazy.

''If the person is so disruptive, whether because of speech or smell or actions, I don't have a problem with asking them to leave a public facility,'' says the ACLU's New Jersey director, Edward Martone. In most cases, a person's aroma is less a form of expression - which could be covered by the Constitution - than behavior, which is not. But if a person chose to swim in a sewer plant and then stroll into the local council meeting as political protest, Martone says that stinky swimmer might have more protection than someone more inadvertently gamy.

The homeless are not the only ones with an odor problem. According to the American Medical Association, some sufferers of alcoholism, diabetes and gangrene can also manifest unpleasant odors because of their illnesses.

While the debate goes on over public spaces and private homes, there seems little doubt that airlines can jettison anyone they like if they feel safety and comfort will be compromised. Airline officials acknowledge their cabins are, by nature, transient melting pots of cultures with varying concepts of hygiene. But if the captain feels most of his flock is uncomfortable, the noisome offender must go.

''I don't think we have to assume, regardless of a person's condition, they have the right to be allowed to board a flight,'' says Chris Witkowski, director of the Aviation Consumer Action Project in Washington. He sees nothing wrong with flight crews banning drunks or other rowdies, but has fought to have airlines accept passengers suffering from Tourette's syndrome, a condition characterized by loud vocal outbursts.

''There's a lot of things people can be thrown off a plane for,'' Witkowski adds. ''People get kicked off a plane all the time and they don't file a lawsuit against an airline.''